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Southwest Airlines to offer at least 3,800 flights next summer

Southwest Airlines announced an expanded schedule Wednesday for next summer, with more than 3,800 weekday departures – 150 more than it and merger partner AirTran Airways had operated at their peaks.

December 23, 2014

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​“Our June and July schedule is the biggest in our history with as many as 3,800 flights a day,” said Andrew Watterson, Southwest’s vice president of network planning & performance.  “What we’re announcing today is an additional investment in many of our long-time communities.  We’re connecting our customers to what’s important to them– more seats at our low fares, our great customer service and policies, and better schedules through nonstop options.”

“We achieve this through a small increase in our scheduled flying fleet, by the lower good-weather summer flying times, and a slight lengthening of our operating day—meaning we’ll start the day a little earlier and end it a little later,” Southwest lead network planner Bill Owen said on Southwest’s Nuts About Southwest blog. “However, we absolutely are keeping our enhanced ontime-performance schedule standards in place.”

He was referring to an Aug. 10, 2014, change in Southwest’s schedule designed to improve the carrier’s ability to operate on time. Southwest’s on-time record has improved significantly since the change.

Southwest and AirTran have been operating separately. But on Dec. 28, the last AirTran flight will operate, with only Southwest remaining after that.

The new schedule extends Southwest’s booking window from June 6 through August 7, 2015.

While the new schedule adds a number of new flights between existing U.S. cities, it doesn’t include any new domestic cities. Southwest has announced plans to launch service to four international cities in 2015, including one that hasn’t been revealed yet.

In addition, the new schedule also doesn’t list any new flights out of Dallas Love Field, where limits on nonstop service throughout the United States were eliminated on Oct. 13.

However, Southwest focused a lot of its growth in fall 2014 on Love Field. Southwest has grown its Love Field schedule from 118 departures prior to Oct. 13 to 149 daily departures today.

It’ll grow the Dallas departures to 153 in early January when it adds Oakland and San Francisco flights from Love Field.

Southwest already operates more flights than any other carrier. According to masFlight, Southwest had 3,451 flights scheduled on Monday, Dec. 15, compared to 2,678 for Delta Air Lines, 1,985 for regional carrier ExpressJet, 1,899 for American Airlines and 1,798 for United Airlines.

Including US Airways, American’s totals rose to 3,019 scheduled departures.

The numbers don’t include flights operated by regional carriers under the major carriers’ brand and code. By that measure, United, Delta and American operate or partner for more flights than Southwest operates.